Here's a practical example of Coil at work: "Disco Hospital", from the
group's latest album Love's Secret Domain (Wax Trax), was largely
created by cutting up pieces of found tape, throwing it into a box,
reassembling the pieces at random, cutting up the resulting cape, and
then going through the process all over again.

Christopherson and his Coil co-conspirator John Balance, who today share a
flat in London, met in the early 1980s, when both were members of Psychic TV.
Formed in 1982, the group grew out of Balance's solo project, which quickly
came to include Christopherson. "Coil didn't ease out of Psychic TV,"
Balance says, "it's just that at the time we were not getting along
with Gen [Genesis P-Orridge, founder of Psychic TV, whom Christopherson had
also played with in Throbbing Gristle), so a split would have happened
anyway?"

Some common traits among those groups include the practice of ritualistic
self mutilation - the current body piercing fad can be traced back to
Psychic TV, via the re/search book Modern Primitives - an interest
in the occult, symbology, white noise, and tape manipulation. Balance and
Chrisropherson shared beliefs about ritual and the ritualistic use of sound,
which is still an important influence on their music. Their first major
release, recorded in early 1984, was "How To Destroy Angels," a
one-sided record featuring a slow, atmospheric shimmering of
gongs. It's described on the jacket as "ritual music for the accumulation
of male sexual energy," though Balance denies the record was intended for
men only.

"It's because we're male that we said it was male sexual energy,"
he says. "Anyone can use it for whatever they like. It's a ritual
piece of music based on the god Mars and the numbers 17 and 5, numbers
associated with Mars in the Kabbalah. It's 17 minutes long, and we had
five huge iron gongs in the piece, and we used swords, which symbolize
Mars, to hit the gongs. We also used bullroarers, which are used
throughout the world for male-only initiation rices. They're like long
sticks that you whirl around your head and they, make a whirring, more
like a feeling than a sound - like a helicopter"

Moving rapidly from Heaven to Earth, the pair released Scatology, in
1985, produced by their friend Jim Thirlwell, better known as Foetus.
"His mania complements our more melancholy side," Christopherson
says. "We wanted someone who would complement our atmosphere with a
certain amount of intense derangement. We didn't want to drift off into
a kind of noodly, soundtracky, wimp-type thing."

No wimp-type thing at all, Scatology is a
mixture of savage percussion, pulsing bass, liner notes about venereal
disease, and lyrics that indict Christianity as an institution. A
particularly intimidating crack is "Godhead=Deathhead," in which
drumbeats hammer away over chanting before giving way to ominous
synthesizer and Balance's voice bitterly intoning, "Virgin Mary, weak
and wild, rids herself of an unwanted child."

Says Balance, "That was me being an angry young man with the first
forum to actually vent my spite. So the words are pointed and deliberately
anti-Christian in the imagery and execution. But now, having gotten that out
of the way, we're sort of demonstrating the other side. We're not so
interested in demolishing what's there by shouting, but by actually acting
upon it... we're born-again pagans. We want to reestablish what was there
before."

Christopherson continues: "With Scatology, we were quite
straightforward in the anger that we felt towards the church,
particularly the more fundamentalist kind of view. At the time we were
recording the record, we were actually handing out leaflets saying, `
Kill a queer for Christ,' and stuff like that. The way we've developed,
we're now more interested in the older and more underlying religious
thoughts."

Despite the hard edge to most of Scatology, the album includes Coil's
investigation of sound for its own sake, which has become more prominent
on the group's later albums. A particularly strong example of this is
"The Sewage Workers Birthday Party," which captures the contradictions
inherent in much of Coil's work.

The name of the piece comes from a vile story in a hardcore Swedish S&M
magazine, yet the music is delicate and profoundly sad, built around a
recording of Balance playing a Chapman Stick bass with an E-bow. The
mysterious noises in the background "are taken from recordings of rituals
and orgiastic things that I was doing at the time," says Christopherson,
in his typically enigmatic fashion. "The mood of those particular
experiments was quiet and meditative in the dirtiest possible way, and that
came through in the music. Our state of mind and our obsessions tend to
permeate their way through, from our personal lives into the subject and the
way we make the music."

One such personal interest is the AIDS crisis. Since the early 1980s, their
lives have been touched by the disease, as many of their friends have died of
its complications. Coil donated the proceeds of their first single, a remake
of "Tainted Love," to AIDS research, and filmed a controversial video
about AIDS that played in Discos around the world.

"We had eyewitness reports of people seeing it in gay discos," Balance
says, "and instead of dancing they'd stop and watch this video, and they'd
have an ashen look on their faces. At the time - this may sound a bit naive -
it was really important, because people were just not taking any notice of
warnings about AIDS. So we had to tastefully shock people, representing a
beautiful young man dying on a bed... in a pop video. That was, in a sense, a
really perverse idea. That's the way we thought we'd get through to people. It
was being shown in the place where people were picking each other up and
catching the virus. It was going right to the heart."

Coil took their ideas a quantum leap forward - musically, lyrically, and
conceptually - on Horse Rotorvator, released in 1987.

Their sound opened up, abandoning Scatology's preoccupation with rhythm
in favor of a more contemplative, lyrical favor, with sampled guitars,
strings on one crack, and sporadic clarinet from Stephen E. Thrower, who
was credited on the album as a third member.

Despite Coil's small victory in getting the message out about AIDS, people
they knew continued to die. "Because of that touch with death, we decided
to explore all aspects of it," says Balance. "I think every
track on Horse Rotorvator is basically about death."

"Ostia" is about the death of Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini,
who was run over on a beach near Rome by a male prostitute. They also
include a cover of Leonard Cohen's "Who By Fire," which details in almost
Biblical terms all the ways a person can die. Over dirge-like chancing,
"The Golden Section" relates an ancient Persian poet's attitude towards
death. And "The First Five Minutes After Death" is an introspective
instrumental that soars into the Great Unknown on wings of sampled
guitar, woodwinds and feedback.

The album isn't "incensed to be morbid or depressive," Christopherson
stresses, "because our views are very much the Buddhism views of continuing
energy, rather than the Western view of death as a final departure of the
final stoppage of everything."

On "The Golden Section," Coil uses an excerpt from a Peter Wilson book
that describes the Persian Sufi poet Rumi's views of death. The words
are read by BBC personality Paul Vaughan, who does a science program on
the British network. "For English listeners," Christopherson
says, "Vaughan's voice will have connotations of scientific authority
and truth, which we felt appropriate. The Persian poet was confident
chat he would be greeted by death, and politely invited to move on to
the next state. We feel that's a scientific truth."

Be that as it may, the obscure album title fits the theme. Balance dreamed
that "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, instead of riding their horses
down and destroying the world, just killed their horses and used the jawbones
to make a big machine. And they churned the earth up with that." The
"horse rotorvator" of the title, he explains, "is a sort of earth-moving
machine made up of horses' jawbones."

With the final chord of "The First Five Minutes After Death," Coil
practically disappeared for four years, not releasing a full-length
studio album until míd-1991. In the interim, they released an album of
experiments and variations, a collection of compilation tracks, and the
almost -soundtrack to Hellraiser, a horror film by Clive Barker.
Hellraiser was partially inspired by magazines about piercing and
"reference material about the more extreme sides of human sexuality"
that Barker had encountered at Balance and Christopherson's apartment,
according to the group. Coil recorded several tracks of chilling samples
and ominous percussion for the film, but the group's involvement was
derailed when Barker's Hollywood backers insisted on a more conventional
soundtrack.

Coil has also released Unnatural History, which collects 12 of the
group's numerous compilation cracks plus "How To Destroy Angels," and
Gold Is the Metal (with the Broadest Shoulders), 50 minutes of never
released singles, outtakes, fragments, and reworkings from Horse Rotorvator.

"For Horse Rotorvator, we almost had enough for a double album,"
Balance says, "and then we sort of honed it down. We had a few bits
left over - some finished, some not - and that's what we evolved into
Gold Is the Metal. If we'd have had enough money at the time it probably
would have come out as a double album. "

However, part of the genesis of Gold Is The Metal is Coil's alchemic
tendency to continually transform their work. "We quite often feel
that when we've put a lot of time and effort and angst into producing an
album, three months later we suddenly think of different ways we could
have done things of different interpretations we hadn't seen as the time
we were doing the album," explains Christopherson. "Some of the
tracks on Gold Is the Metal start out in a similar way to tracks on
Horse Rotorvator, or are different versions of tracks on the original
album."

Finally, in 1991, Coil released the long promised Love's Secret
Domain, delayed by problems with Some Bizarre, the label
that had released Horse Rotorvator. Love's Secret Domain is a much
more upbeat album, brimming with layers of sound and complex percussion
patterns. The lyrics are lighter and more optimistic than chose of Horse
Rotorvator.

"We were aware of the possible interpretation of the last album as being
morbid," says Christopherson. "But just as in our personal lives, we're
interested in having a good and interesting and incense time, regardless of
the consequences in the future. You can sit and worry about whether you're
going to die next year or in ten years time, and there's really not much
point. It's much more interesting to have intense and passionate and..."

Balance interrupts: "The responsible abuse of pleasure is what we're
talking about at the moment..."

"...which doesn't mean that the album is about taking drugs, particularly,
"
Christopherson continues. "It's not. It's much more about ways to
increasingly potentiate the intensity of one's life."

The first of the album's two singles, Windowpane, combines those two
interests. Named after a particularly potent brand of LSD,
the song is about "opening up gateways, both physical and metaphorical,"
according to Christopherson. Windowpane is six minutes of slow,
textured sequencer tracks over drifting synthesizer,
with Balance dreamily intoning the lyrics, "If you want to touch the sky,
just put a window in your eye." The beat is strong enough to dance to,
though, as Balance quips, "If you had windowpane you probably wouldn't -
you'd probably just lie down and listen."

While Windowpane has a great beat and catchy vocals, it's largely the use
of samples that makes the song - as well as much of Coil's work so
compelling. Christopherson has been sampling since the late 1970s when
Throbbing Gristle keyboard player Chris Carter built a primitive
sampler to Christopherson's design, connecting six cassette players to a
one-octave keyboard. Coil's current equipment is far more sophisticated, but
it's what they do with it that's important. "For me a sound is a sound,"
Christopherson says. "It doesn't matter how it's made. You can make
it with a piece of tape or a piece of RAM memory or a piece of string."

Samples account For 6O to 70 percent of the sounds on Coil's albums, but
Christopherson and Balance will do whatever it takes to get the sounds they
want, often running high-tech devices like computers through low-tech
devices like fuzz boxes. Because of this mutilation of technology, Coil's
music has a human warmth that is rare in electronically programmed and
treated music. The payoff is heard on tracks like "Ostia," with its
beautiful acoustic-guitar samples, or the "Golden Section," where
Christopherson's manipulated vocal samples lend a cinematic aura worthy
of Ben Hur.

"Dark River," from Love's Secret Domain, uses what sounds
like backwards, sloweddown bells to create a hypnotic collage of sounds
that takes its listeners farther out than several hits of LSD could.
Love's Secret Domain uses Coil's widest range of sounds to date, making
wise use of instrumentation to create lush timbres. On "Where Even the
Darkness Is Something To See," the group uses layers of rhythmically
droning didgeridoo which interact with the drum beats to create a
stunningly original sound.

Balance and Christopherson now feel chat the one advantage to the album's
enforced delay is the time it gave them to set the material aside and rework
it later.

"We worked it and reworked it over in the space of a year," says
Balance. "We wanted everything to be latent and inherent, rather than
obvious and easy to understand. So we sort of folded, everything in on itself
mutated all the vocals, put all the samples in, and took the whole track and
mutated it again through a flange. The whole thing was sort of like a pudding.
The result is that the meaning is fragmented to such an extent that it could
almost mean anything."

"But it's not nonsense," he insits, "it's that everything is hidden
and packaged away, and you have to find it yourself. We took away the sense
and left the sensation. We took away the meaning and left the feeling.
Listeners have to really involve themselves much more than on anything we've
ever done. This album requires more than listening carefully - that's too
passive. You have to listen actively."

This end result has a lot to do with Balance and Christopherson's
transformative working method. Christopherson "starts everything
off," Balance says, "and I come along and tell him to change
everything. We work by erasing half of each other's work. He does
something and I'll come along and say, `That's shit.' He'll leave it for
awhile, and I'll come back a week later and say, `Oh, that's quite good,'
where in fact it's the same track."

Despite the technology and the long time it took to produce Love's Secret
Domain, Balance and Christopherson always made the process of making the
music into a ritual, albeit one they only hint at in conversation.
Discussing a particular track, Christopherson says, "Both the
recording and the mixing process involved a very intense experience for
us, both from a musical point of view and ..."

"... a pharmaceutical point of view," Balance interrupts. "We sort
of made the studio sacred and then blasphemed. "